Product Photography BTS:

This is behind the scene of a product photography shot I want to share with you, hope it will be useful for the community.

The idea

The idea was to create perfume shot with splash with heart shape around perfume.

My target was to get:

cap with bright spot on the middle and dark edges
neck with black edges and black stripe on the middle
chrome body with black edges, bright large spot on the middle and two small bright spots (one on the left and one on the right)
bright glass body without dark edges.

Bottle was a bit hard to shot because cap is semi glossy, neck is chrome and cylindrical, chrome body is like half chrome ball so I divided bottle on four parts:

cap
neck (cylindrical shape)
chrome body
glass body
First I did perfume shot and then splash shot. I used Cambo Ultima camera system because I was photographing perfume from the bottom and with that camera system I can fix perspective distortion. To fix perspective first element (lens) must be higher than camera sensor.

Perfume photo-shot

As top light I used another Einstein E640W with reflector and 7″ reflector with 40° honeycomb grid and barndoor.

As diffuser I user Savage Trans Lum plastic – very easy to cut, strong and keeps shape – I just love it 🙂 As you know I need 4 shots to have bottle done. First I did cap shot. Diffuser was with two black stripes behind bottle and light above diffuser.

And here is cap shot (take a look at glass body – I will explain later why is not very nice)

For neck shot I added one stripe of black paper above lens. I dont have photo but it was the same like on draw bellow.

Neck looks OK, but take a look on cap and chrome body – we see reflection because I added black stripe of paper and cap and chrome body looks not nice. Thats the neck shot.

Now is time for chrome body shot. I removed black stripe which I used for neck shot and I added a bit of power on top light.

Next is the last part of bottle – glass body. I had a problem because I was shoting from bottom to the top and back of chrome body is visible and that looks very bad.

I removed cap and chrome body from the bottle and that solved the problem. I don’t like dark edges on the bottle when liquid inside is bright and background is white so I used again Savage plastics as diffuser. Because glass with that shape works as lens I used cylindrical shape diffuser. Two light sources – back and front top.

Water Splash Photography

I used water dye to have blue and yellow water. They are very concentrated 3 caps of dye for 1 bucket of water 🙂

As camera I used Canon 5D MKII with 100mm f/2.8L macro lens and F18 | 1/200s and manual triggering. Lighting setup again is very easy. Two lights: one behind diffuser and one on the top. I used Savage plastic for background as well and bare 7″ reflector. Both lights in action mode with flash duration about 1/5000s.

I used small light stand to set a focus and to see where is centre of focus.

I used many buckets of colored water – many interesting shapes has been captured 🙂

The Final Image:

And that’s it. I hope it was interesting. Any questions please leave a comment below!